Big Data

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has announced that it is honoring Professor Piotr Indyk and Professor Dina Katabi for their innovations in computing technology. Indyk has been named one of the recipients of the Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award, which honors specific theoretical accomplishments that have had a significant and demonstrable effect on the practice of computing. Katabi has been honored as one of the recipients of the Grace Murray Hopper Award, which recognizes the outstanding young computer professionals of the year.

Professor Rob Miller is one of four MIT faculty selected as 2013 MacVicar Faculty Fellow for outstanding undergraduate teaching, mentoring and educational innovation. One recommender wrote: “I think Rob embodies the ideal of an MIT teacher — caring, engaging, tirelessly working on behalf of the students, eliciting respect, admiration, and joy from the students.”

Researchers working with EECS faculty member and CSAIL principal investigator Samuel Madden, are developing a new system called DBSeer to address the realities of cloud computing -- particularly database applications requiring over expenditure for hardware. In June, Professor Madden and members of the MIT Database Group including first author of two papers on this work, postdoctoral associate Barzan Mozafari will present their work at the annual meeting of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Management of Data (SIGMOD).

"In our heads it's like a big world of small motions out there." Bill Freeman, professor of electrical engineering and computer science and associate department head of the Electrical Engineeering and Computer Science Department at MIT describes in a NY Times video his software that enables video magification to see what we can't normally see but might like to.

Anant Agarwal, president of edX, the worldwide, online learning initiative of MIT and Harvard University and professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). He is recognized “for contributions to shared-memory and multicore computer architectures.”

With the fall 2012 launch of the bigdata@csail center, which represents a focused effort to understand and put to good use the huge amounts of data generated all the time, a handful of members of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at MIT are contributing specifically to medical applications. The MIT News Office has featured the work of Peter Szolovits, John Guttag, Alan Willsky and -- perhaps at the heart of abstractly looking at big data and medicine -- former EECS undergraduate and masters degree student David Rashef, now an MD/PhD student with the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology (HST) program. Read more...

In an effort to bring a more human dimension to the online education experience, MIT Professor Rob Miller and EECS graduate students Mason Tang and Elena Tatarchenko have developed a new computer system that will help provide students with feedback on their homework assignments and create more interaction between students, teachers, and alumni.

In the effort to handle data overload, Daniela Rus, professor of computer science MIT and director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) has teamed with postdoctoral associate Daniel Feldman to describe a novel way to represent data so that it takes up much less space in memory but can still be processed in conventional ways when needed.

Dropbox co-founder Drew Houston, who earned his undergraduate degree in computer science at MIT in 2005 and teamed with then EECS undergraduate student Arash Ferdowsi to found the company, will be the MIT June 7, 2013 Commencement speaker. "I’ve had some of the most formative experiences of my life at MIT,” Houston says. “It’s where Dropbox started and where I met my co-founder, Arash, so it’s an honor to come back and share my story. Technology is at the heart of how we shape our future and confront our challenges, and more than ever the world needs MIT graduates to lead us forward.”

Hal Abelson, the Class of 1922 Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at MIT and principal investigator at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) and computer science student Kang Zhang have developed a crowd sourcing system that has analyzed the tweets of roughly 10 million U.S. voters as the national election came and went. Read more...